Dr. Shaimaa Hussein

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of personalized learning on the development of oral business communication among first-year Business English students at the Higher Institution of Languages and Simultaneous Interpretation. Despite a standardized Business English curriculum designed to foster all four language skills, students exhibit diverse educational backgrounds (public, private, and international schools), leading to varied language learning needs. To address this, the researcher implemented a personalized syllabus that aligns with individual student language learning needs to prepare them for market demands. The study focused on first-year business students. An initial assessment of English proficiency was conducted, from which 30 upper-intermediate level students were randomly selected. Their preferred learning strategy, audiovisual learning, was a key consideration in the intervention design. Specifically, the researcher tailored the movie The Devil Wears Prada as a medium to develop students' speaking fluency. A pre-post quasi-experiment design was employed to evaluate the intervention's effectiveness. The results demonstrate a significant enhancement in the business English students' speaking skills, supporting the efficacy of personalized learning approaches in this context.